Christians and the law

Issues of church and state have arisen many times in the U.S. with regard to what is legal and what is illegal in the relationship between the two. Today, a major issue is whether bakery shops must prepare wedding cakes for same-sex marriages. But having necessarily purchased public service licenses to engage in those businesses leaves no question. Licenses include no provision for excluding service for persons of whom the holder disapproves. The service must be available for anyone of proper age and with money to pay. Otherwise, persons could be refused service on the basis of height, eye color, hair color, or any number of characteristics. Were there still laws against same-sex marriage, refusal to sell a wedding cake for such an event would be legally appropriate. Since such weddings are now legal, however, businesses licensed to sell wedding cakes may not refuse on that basis.

The issue is not the morality or immorality of same-sex marriage, but the relationship between church and state. Morally, in distinction to legally, we are obligated to obey the law only so long as the law is just. Anyone who considers a law to be unjust must either obey, disobey or seek to change the law. Whoever refuses to obey the law must be prepared to pay the penalty. Martin Luther King led a movement challenging the nation’s racial laws as unjust. He was jailed, beaten and assassinated, but eventually his cause was successful. In the 1950s a friend of mine, a pacifist on the basis of the teachings of Jesus, refused to register for Selective Service. He was sentenced to prison, but later became one of the major voices in the United Methodist Church. In the 1940s, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer refused to obey Nazi law and was hanged for doing so.

Many western Christians today mistakenly assume that the government’s law automatically is Christian, or at least not in conflict with Christian teachings, and that if they truly love God and are faithful Christians, they automatically will obey secular law. In the New Testament, however, Jesus warns that we cannot serve both Christ and Caesar. There are times that we erroneously assume that Caesar (the United States) and Christ walk hand in hand. Candidates for public office, especially for legal office, sometimes list church membership as one of their qualifications. The United States, however, as I have frequently asserted, is not a Christian nation. Not all that is legally permissible is appropriate for Christians. Christians certainly should obey laws that promote the benefit and well-being of a just society. But when a legal requirement is considered offensive to faith and in contrast to the will of God, the Christian must decide whether to obey Caesar or obey God. The decision will carry inevitable consequences.

Same-sex marriage, then, is only one of the many issues that have created divisions both in society and in the church. Ironically, later generations frequently have hailed as heroes those martyrs the church once excommunicated or even executed for refusing to obey the law. We no longer execute persons over violation of church law, but shunning and expulsion still are common. If many Christians who today celebrate as heroes the martyrs of faith had lived in the days of those martyrs, I suspect they might have been quite willing to hold the rope or light the fire.